More on large HD support in XP
on 09.14.04, 01:47pm in windows • digg this • comments (4)
Yesterday, I posted about my trouble when I was attempting to Ghost my old hard drive over to a new 160GB Seagate. Mike Dimmick posted a comment that seems to provide the answer:
Windows XP requires a registry setting to support IDE/ATA disks bigger than 128GB:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters]
EnableBigLba=DWORD:1
I assume that this wasn’t set on your original volume and therefore it wouldn’t boot when ghosted. You’ll also have problems with differing IDE chipsets and main chipsets, although that usually manifests itself as ERROR_INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.
More research lead me to KB article 30313 - How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP, which basically says:
- You need to have an up to date version of atapi.sys (5.1.2600.1135).
- You need to enable the registry fix Mike suggests.
I should have checked both of these things before ghosting the original partition. However, here’s my question: Assuming I had the latest atapi.sys (I was running XPSP2), why is the registry hack fix needed? Why can’t it just look at the disk, determine it’s a large size and go down whatever code path that the registry setting does?
Anyways, I hope this information is helpful to someone so they don’t also kill an entire Sunday afternoon.
Randy (September 14, 2004 @ 2:20 pm)
What I find to be odd is that I went from an 80GB drive into a 160GB drive, using Ghost. I checked the registry last night to see if I had the EnableBigLba DWORD value and I didn’t. I couldn’t tell ya what version of atapi.sys I have, but I can look into it.
The better question is: if I DON’T have this key now, while running a 160GB drive, should I turn it on and what’s more, what changes if I do?
The Mind Boggles.
Sean McLeod (September 14, 2004 @ 6:48 pm)
Read that KB article again.
The registry key is only for XP pre SP1, SP1 and later doesn’t use the registry key.
Note The previous registry setting is ignored in Windows XP SP1 and later.
Steve (September 14, 2004 @ 8:06 pm)
Interesting. My box was XP Pro, that was upgraded to SP1, that was upgraded to SP2, so who knows.
All I do know, is that after the repave ALOT of my issues (install problems, VS issues, etc) are now gone.
Jim (September 16, 2004 @ 4:02 pm)
I just went through the same thing over the last couple days. Post-SP1 XP doesn’t use/need the registry setting. But you should double-check the version of your atapi.sys file. I’ve been keeping up to date on patches (though haven’t done SP2 yet)and I still had an old version of atapi.sys. If you need a new version Microsoft refers you to a patch that will provide it (though the patch description has nothing to do with large hard drive support). In my case, I didn’t have Ghost so had to cross my fingers and use Maxtor’s included partition copy utility. It worked fine (one trivial error w/ an unimportant file on another partition) but took *FOREVER* (many, many hours per partition). I definitely agree with your point though: most non-techies I know would run away screaming before they got through even the first couple steps of this process.